5/5 Captures the endemic seach for liberation in 1930's Paris
  by Linda Linguvic (New York City)
This 1990 film, directed by Philip Kaufman, is set in Paris in 1931. This was a time and place between the two world wars that attracted writers and artists to a bohemian lifestyle, a time of discarding old conventions and embracing experimentation. Here, Henry Miller, an American expatriate wrote his wildly erotic books, which were banned in the United States. And Anais Nin, known for her extensive diaries about her sensory experiences, began her literary career here. It's no wonder that the two of them would meet and couple. They were both married at the time and this film is about the complex relationships between Henry, Anais, and their respective mates, all searching of a kind of liberation which was endemic at the time.

Fred Ward plays Henry as a crass American with a Brooklyn accent that makes native New Yorkers, such as myself, cringe. He's all man though and it's easy to see why Anais Nin, played by the large-eyed petite Portuguese actress Maria de Medereiros, is attracted to him. Her own husband, Richard E. Grant, is attractive as well, and it's clear that they have a good romantic life together, but he's willing to look the other way at his wife's desire for others. When Miller's wife, June, played by Uma Thurman, a fiery androgynous mother-earth figure, comes on the scene, Anais Nin finds herself attracted to her as well. This sets the scene for some interesting complexities.

The video is two hours and 16 minutes long and I expected to watch only half of it one evening and the rest of it the next night. However, from the moment it started I was completely captured by the story and just had to watch it all the way through. The cinematography is so good that it was even nominated for an academy award, not for just the excellent views of Paris, but for the way the intimate scenes are done which manage to convey the relationships and the sensualities of the moment while avoiding being explicit. The focus is on the romance and the concepts rather than the physical acts. This kept the scenes erotic and it also moved the story forward. I was totally intrigued and kept wondering what would happen next.

The acting was uniformly good, but special note goes to Maria de Medeiros who played Anais Nin. As she works primarily in French films, I had never seen her before. She uses her huge dark eyes and facial expresses so well, that just a glance conveys layers of meaning. She's the focal point of every scene, in spite of the larger and more voluptuous Uma Thurman. And that's exactly what the director intended.

Some might find this film slow as the drama and tension is just about the people, not about world events or outside influence. However, it manages to create a time and a place and people that influenced the literary world as well as the mores of future generations.

5/5 HENRY MILLER ACCORDING TO ANAIS NIN
  by wdanthemanw (Geneva, Switzerland)
At least two movies of Philip Kaufman will stay in movie history, THE RIGHT STUFF and HENRY & JUNE. Produced by Philip Kaufman's son, co-written with his wife Rose Kaufman, HENRY & JUNE is a family affair. One could say that it is a european movie filmed in an american manner. Don't get me wrong, it's a compliment !

Fred Ward as Henry Miller, portuguese actress Maria de Medeiros as Anais Nin and Uma Thurman as the woman inspiring the two writers, Richard E. Grant and Kevin Spacey in smaller parts, the whole cast gives a superb performance. Don't expect pornographic scenes in HENRY & JUNE, sex is more suggested than showed. Philip Kaufman is interested in the relation between Henry and Anais and doesn't follow Henry Miller in his multiple adventures in Paris' brothels.

Henry Miller lives in a Paris that Federico Fellini could have created : enjoy this carnaval full of fellinian faces or Henry Miller's neighbors (you can recognize among them french clown Pierre Etaix in one of his last performances). Philip Kaufman has recreated the Paris which was the center of such movies as Marcel Carné's LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS or LE JOUR SE LEVE. Poetic realism was the name of this french movement of the 1935-1945 period.

Average extra-features but over the top audio and video transfers.

A DVD for your library.

4/5 Literate Passion
  by Moira D. Russell (Seattle, WA, US)
One of the most underrated movies of the 90s. (It also marks a disappointing moment when the studio _could_ have backed up an NC-17 film not porn but meant for _real_ adults....but caved to puritanism instead). The top two reasons to see it are the performances of Maria de Medeiros as Anais Nin (it's almost a reincarnation) and Uma Thurman as June, two of the sexiest, most intelligent, passionate portrayals of women in recent cinema. Forget Thelma and Louise -- these two are a combustible pair. Fred Ward's performance as Henry Miller, too low-key, is pretty much lost in the shuffle, without any of the dynamic magnetism Miller had in spades. The movie explores the nature of desire, infatuation, obsession, and real love, and is pretty faithful to the actual events -- but some elements (such as the significance of June's puppet Count Bruga, made for her by her lesbian lover, Jean) are lost in the translation to the screen. For people bored to tears by the dichotomy of soulless porn on the one hand and Hollywood mush on the other, this is an intelligent and _sexy_ movie. Two lovely companion books are Anais Nin's diary "Henry and June," on which the movie was based, and Nin's and Miller's unexpurgated letters, "A Literate Passion." That title sums up both their lives and the movie based on them.

5/5 art as pornography or vice versa?
  by Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France)
This is a film, based on lots of written materials from both Anais Nin and Henry Miller, about an extraordinary period in Paris of the 1930s. I love that city, and the film evokes it in all its unique beauty and ferment, with the fascist revolution of Germany in the background. For over 30 years, I have studied the Paris of that time, and this film is one of the best on it.

The theme of the film is Nin's erotic awakening, when as a meek though ambitious woman - kept by an unusually tolerant banker husband who is the only charicature in the film - she seeks lovers, both men and women. She is portrayed exceptionally well by de Medeiros, as a kind of proto-feminist and budding writer. The people she is drawn to are an unconventional couple, Miller and his bi-sexual wife, who are concerned with art and seeking the spark they once felt in eachother with others. While this is a common dilemma, the fact that they are artists in an amazing time makes their journey unique and stunningly vivid.

Things are more or less from the point of view of Nin, whose diaries are the principal source, with a dash of Miller thrown in. We watch her emerge from private pain and frustration with her dull, though loyal husband, seeking to forge a way for herself to ecstacy and totality. It is a grand experiment that, I must say, us mortals in conventional relationships will never understand, except perhaps in fantasy. She has the audacity to really do it, to live it. (Or so she syas.)

Nin is one of the first "moderns" whose lives are their work of art, whose actions and choices surpass their artistic output as a way of entering our imaginations. You can view them in many different ways: pioneers, simple egoists, or superior beings. What is great about them is how much they reflect of the history of our times, when so many certainties were breaking down as new (non-christian) ideologies were emerging. That makes this an exceptional film.

Uma Thurman is also brilliant as Miller's troubled wife. She has this indefinable air about her, a femme fatale who is also pathetic and vulnerable. While she hangs in the background, in many ways she is the character that controls the actions of the others, laughing at them while also suffering. This may be her greatest performance. She rules the climactic moment of the film.

While I fall into the camp that views these people as marginal narcissists and mediocre artists, this film is a wonderful snapshot in time. No matter who you are, you will react to it differently, in your own way and with your own vocabulary. That makes this a true work of art. It stimulates and provokes, but cannot be buttonholed.

Warmly recommended.

3/5 Erotica VS Romance
  by Mr. Cairene (Cairo, Egypt)
Most veiwers who seek out Philip Kuafman's Henry & June will be curious about the sexual content of the film which made the MPAA invent the NC-17 rating, they will be disappointed. The sex in Henry & June is not groundbreakingly explicit, but there sure is a lot of it. For those viewers I would reccomend Jean-Jacques Beineix's spectacularly bad (and Oscar nominated) 1986 film Betty Blue.

Henry & June tells the story of American writer Henry Miller(Fred Ward) and his wife June(Uma Thurman) as seen through the eyes of Anais Nin(Maria de Medeiros), and here is the film's biggest problem, it is told from the wrong prespective. Anais is a spoilt emotianlly immature woman who seeks sexual exprementation for no reason other then lust in the guise of artful reasoning like "I need to know people who are alive." The film would have much more involving had it been told from Henry's point of view. As played by Fred Ward he is brutish, easy going, funny and exhilerated by the sexual liberty in 1930s Paris. He is a man who cries when watching his actress wife in an erotic film. Unlike Anais he actually has feelings that the audience can identify with. Perhaps this was unavoidable as the film is adapted from Anais Nin's diaries.

The most interesting character in the film is Henry's bisexual wife June. Played by Uma Thurman with a deep throaty voice, we see her at first as an opportunistic woman who uses sex to advance her interests, but as the film progrsses we learn that a real pain and self loathing is hidden under her sleak exterior. She is alaways emotionally blackmailing Henry and Anais, to make her a more noble figure in their books. This is one of Uma Thurman's best performances, she delivers her lines with a throaty sexuality, "I've made mistakes, but I've made them superbly" she says.

Due to the overtly erotic nature of the film, it becomes emotionally aloof. Romance and erotica are polar opposittes. In a love scene, the less you know about the people involved the more erotic it is, but less romantic. Most of the naked women in Henry & June are extras, and the lead character Anais is a mystery anyway. The result is visually gripping but emtionally uninvolving. Philip Kaufman's 1988 masterpiece The Unbearable Lightness of Being was also erotic, but that film was much more effective because he made you care about the characters before they got naked.

The best thing about Henry & June is the details. You could watch this film with absolutely no dialogue and not lose anything. The recreation of 1930s Paris is a feast for the eyes, and Philippe Rouselot's cinamatagrphy is beautiful. I loved how the film re-created parts of that era, the underground lesbian clubs, the semi-nude parades in the streets, the old cinemas where the characters watch Luis Bunuel's then scandlous UN CHEIN ANDALOU and a particularly amusing group of magicians who pick pockets as a side job.

Early on in the film Henry Miller criticises D.H. Lawrence "He makes too much out of sex, he makes a damn gospel out of it, my way sex is natural like birth or death". I don't know if this criticism is apt for Lawrence but it certainly would be for the director of this film Philip Kaufman.